With Loving Hut, Vegan Dining Infiltrates Midtown

February 11, 2010

New York’s about to get its very first organic vegan food truck, so it shouldn’t come as a great shock that midtown, that haven of white sauce and hot meat, is now home to a vegan lunch spot.

Midtown Lunch reports that Loving Hut, an international vegan chain, recently opened its latest location on Seventh Avenue near 29th Street. Its menu is full of ersatz meat–think vegan beef and chicken–and slightly ominous names such as “Vegan Joy,” “Protein Quesadilla,” and “Health Vegetables.”

Interestingly, Loving Hut, despite its global ambitions (there are locations from Korea to San Francisco), is a not-for-profit business. According to its website, “Our main odjective [sic] is to help people easily transcend to the Vegan Diet which will help save the planet!”

The website also claims that the “Loving Hut Vegan Concept” was created by Supreme Master Ching Hai, a spiritual teacher and the creator of the Quan Yin method, a kind of meditation whose adherents refrain from a whole roster of things, including “taking what is not offered,” sexual misconduct, and, yes, eating meat. The Loving Hut website explains that Ching Hai “wants to help the world with a more compassionate and noble way of living by providing convinience [sic] all over the world!”